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Dive In, the Music's Fine: New York Rock Shows Move Outdoors

The pool at McCarren Park in Brooklyn, unused for two decades, will be the site for a number of concerts this summer.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

THE McCARREN PARK POOL in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is surely one of the last places in New York you would expect to see a concert. Shuttered by the city 22 years ago, it is a 50,000-square-foot void, its floor specked with decades-old turquoise paint and its walls blanketed by layers of graffiti. It lacks electricity and lights, and its bathrooms have long been boarded up. And it is a pool. As in splish-splash.

But in the strange logic of the New York summer concert season — when a pier on the Hudson River and the boardwalk of the South Street Seaport play host to loud indie rock, and the empty courtyard of a Queens museum becomes a dancing and people-watching nexus — this all makes the McCarren Park Pool an ideal performance space. It's enormous, it's a blank slate, and it's available: three uncommon and highly prized attributes.

"It's just been sitting there, like the monolith in '2001,' " said Sam Kinken, who books concerts throughout the New York region for Live Nation, the giant promoter. He has programmed six nights at the pool, beginning July 29 with the British band Bloc Party.

McCarren is the newest of the city's big summer music spaces, competing with top-drawer series like SummerStage in Central Park, Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park and River to River in the plazas and parks of Lower Manhattan.

But it will also join another, less celebrated fraternity, that of the especially odd outdoor concert space. From the streets of Coney Island, where The Village Voice's Siren Music Festival will take place on July 15, to Pier 54, a 770-foot expanse jutting into the Hudson River whose indie-rock credentials include a show five years ago by the almost-famous White Stripes, these places exemplify New York's peculiar geopolitics, in which every scrap of real estate, no matter how tiny or decrepit, can and must be used to its fullest potential.

At the McCarren pool, the transformation from cracked-concrete hulk to concert space began with an invitation from the Parks Department. The pool, one of 11 built around the city in 1936 by the W.P.A., held up to 6,800 swimmers and featured an imposing arched pavilion that, as the American Institute of Architects' Guide to New York City put it, "announced the grand dip behind."

It was closed in 1984 after falling into "derelict condition," a Parks Department spokesman said, and has largely remained in that state: graffiti, broken bricks in the pavilion, a forest of weeds sprouting up in the pool basin. The city has long wanted to restore it — the other 10 pools are in good shape — but a recent estimate put the cost at a prohibitive $40 million.

Last year, when the choreographer and arts advocate Noémie Lafrance petitioned to put on a dance performance in the pool, the Parks Department requested proposals to use the space for arts and community events, hoping that it would spark interest in the pool and raise money for its restoration. Two very different groups contributed money in return for the right to present events there and charge admission: Sens Production, Ms. Lafrance's nonprofit dance company, raised $50,000, and Live Nation gave $200,000. The combined contribution was used to prepare the space for minimal use. (The city has allocated $1 million for major capital improvements to the pool; that project is still in the design phase, a Parks spokesman said.)

Sens was the first to use the pool, presenting "Agoura," a site-specific dance piece, last September. Meanwhile Live Nation adapted to an unusual opportunity in the New York concert world: programming a huge space — capacity: 5,500 — that had been lying dormant and unrecognized for decades.

Mr. Kinken said that booking agents were confused at first. "I'm still trying to sell this story," he said. "I brought the head of the music department from William Morris a week ago. I was trying to explain the concept, but as soon as he walked in, he said, 'Oh, O.K., I get it.' "

Besides Bloc Party, the Live Nation shows include the indie-folk act Iron & Wine, the jam band Gov't Mule, the singer Neko Case and a double bill of Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Tickets range from $33.50 to $45.

Photo

The Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone last week at Central Park SummerStage, one of New York's many outdoor concert series.Credit
Joe Fornabaio for The New Yoek Times

Live Nation is not the only group presenting concerts at the pool. JellyNYC, which puts on shows at Southpaw, a small rock club in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has booked nine consecutive Sundays of free concerts at McCarren, beginning July 9 with two fashionable indie bands, Les Savy Fav and Dragons of Zynth. Other bands lined up for that series include Deerhoof, the Walkmen, Dead Meadow, Of Montreal and Dr. Dog.

To offer its concerts free, JellyNYC is relying on an essential financial source for summer series: corporate sponsorships.

River to River, a series of 500 events that includes subfestivals like the concerts at Castle Clinton and the South Street Seaport, has a budget of $7 million that is mostly covered by sponsorships, said Bill Schreiber, its executive producer. American Express, which has been with the festival since it began in 2002, is the largest contributor. "They're essentially paying for the tickets for everyone to come," Mr. Schreiber said of River to River's sponsors.

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This year Snapple is the lead sponsor of Central Park SummerStage, which has 35 events presented by the City Parks Foundation with a budget of about $2 million, a little more than a quarter of which comes from corporate donors.

Sponsorships are the reason many big stages are dominated by company flags and banners, and some summer presenters have worked to avoid such relationships. The East River Music Project, which stages a handful of concerts at the amphitheater in East River Park — a thin strip of green along the East Village and Lower East Side — does not solicit or accept corporate support.

"Our mission statement is to not have corporate involvement," said Sarah Bennett, who helped found the East River Music Project and has been putting on concerts at the amphitheater for four years. "We have a goal of never having someone sell you something just so that you can hear live music."

The amphitheater was the site of Joseph Papp's first free outdoor Shakespeare performances in the 1950's, but the park was in a rough state when Ms. Bennett first came across it in 2000. A stroke of luck came in December 2001, when it was cleaned up by the environmental advocate Erin Brockovich, who led a one-day restoration (with corporate support) that was featured in an ABC television special.

The East River Music Project's programming leans to the noisy: its next show, on July 22, will feature Jonathan Kane, an experimental musician who was a founding member of the famously loud 1980's New York band the Swans. But as is often the case with concerts presented outside, the environment can have a surprising effect on the sound of the music.

"Our bands usually play in tiny, tiny clubs," Ms. Bennett said. "But in the open air, with tugboats going behind them, it's strangely ideal. We've had noise bands play, and for music that is so discordant, to have it in such a serene setting balances it out."

In Long Island City, Queens, the plain concrete walls of the courtyard of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center are the backdrop to Warm Up, a weekly dance party that has become a flirty social scene. And Stephen Dima, who books the Seaport Music Festival at the South Street Seaport, has found a similar communion with unlikely surroundings. He presented music at the World Trade Center Plaza, and took on the Seaport series when River to River began in 2002. His goal, he said, was to create "New York's best free outdoor club," with bookings that would appeal to regulars at clubs like the Bowery Ballroom and the Knitting Factory. But at the seaport?

"Before 9/11 the last time I was there was at a blind date in high school," Mr. Dima said.

The series has become a fixture in the indie scene, with must-see concerts like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah last summer — booked well in advance, long before the band became the underground success story of 2005 — and the annual shows by the punk singer Ted Leo, who soldiers on each year despite bad luck with the weather and with cosmic bummers like the 2003 blackout. The setting, with the masts of antique ships and gleaming skyscrapers in the background, is incongruous but lends a levity that no club can match. And, Mr. Dima said, "there are not too many places where people can walk around with a beer and a cigarette and listen to free music."

Mr. Kinken of Live Nation said that he was expecting similar kinds of serendipity with the McCarren pool. Because of its large size and uncomplicated layout, he said, staging concerts there should be relatively easy. There are convenient spots to put the stage — on the side of the pool, raised just a foot above the ground — as well as a backstage area, concessions and portable toilets. The speaker cabinets will be angled down toward the crowd, to minimize echo off the walls.

The bands, he said, would do the rest. "It will be their manifest destiny to fill up the space," he said. "They'll make that room feel like it's intimate. They'll make it their own, fill it up with sound."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E5 of the New York edition with the headline: Dive In, the Music's Fine: Rock Moves Outdoors. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe